advertising sucks, but i like archiving furry ads. furry ads are the only good ads, imo - both a great at-a-glance slice of the stylistic norms of furry culture, as well as a great slice of the awkward weirdness of it all, a genuineness that you don't really see anywhere else, except maybe webcomics.
i've spent the past couple of days going through FurAffinity ads in a spree of obsessive archiving. unlike most times, this time i've been saving every ad, not just what i vaguely call "product" ads in my head (pending a better term) - that is, writing, comics, animation, physical merch, games, 3D work, and various services - basically anything that's not 2D single image commissions, YCHs and adopts. i don't think i'll do this all the time, because there's a lot of ads and pages to archive, but it's a good way to get a quick impression of the standard artstyle conventions of the current era.
it's also given me a good idea of the total size of the FurAffinity adspace, which is kind of quite a bit bigger than i expected, given how often i see ads repeat. in the past couple days alone i saved about 320 ads. in the last month i saved 70 beyond that, so about 400 ads, and i'm still routinely finding new ads every 8 ads or so. given that i was finding new ads around every 4 ads for the past hundred, i'd wager there's maybe 50 to 100 more ads lurking out there i've yet to be randomly served. perhaps 500 total! maybe even more.
just kind of wild i guess! and that's just a small slice of the artists doing commissions and selling stuff in total, which itself is a fraction of artists in general, and FA is just a slice of the greater furry net at this point. site metrics at the bottom of any FA page indicate that it gets some tens of thousands of active users at peak hours, which i'm guessing might point to an upper limit of... maybe 100k regular users? and millions more live on social media, probably.
i don't know exactly what i'm getting at. i guess i just think it's great that there are so many furries! and even if it's advertising, i kind of appreciate being shown a random scattershot of the immensity of our culture and its cool and often weird and goofy creation whenever i'm browsing. some day i'll compile this all into a proper website, but for now, i leave you with a few more highlights:
